Excerpt from Followers by Megan Angelo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But tonight, Ida was missing, recast without explanation. A new girl—olive-skinned and sleek, formidably cheekboned, with bronze lipstick and black hair parted into pigtail braids—sat in Ida's chair with her bare feet pulled up under her, like she had been here forever.

Marlow looked at Jacqueline, who stood in the center of the thick sand-colored carpet, holding up something called a "scrunchie." At these parties, Jacqueline pushed things that, according to her invites, changed her life: ab gadgets, smoothies, ugly quilted handbags. Marlow knew—they all knew—that none of these things had really changed Jacqueline's life. The network chose the items based on sponsorship agreements. Then Jacqueline threw parties where she raised them up and gushed about them to her dozen in-person guests and her roughly nine-point-nine million followers—plus all of her guests' followers, too. The items the network chose reflected Jacqueline's core audience demo: married mothers across America, aged twenty-eight to forty-four, who tuned in while folding laundry around 9:00 p.m. on weeknights. Though Jacqueline fit squarely in with her followers—she was thirty-eight, with two daughters—she was always embarrassed when someone mentioned her demo. "It makes me feel so old and boring," she told Marlow once. "It's better than mine," Marlow had said. No one would argue with that.

"Where's Ida?" Marlow called to Jacqueline, raising her voice above the scrunchie-induced oohs and aahs.

Jacqueline ignored her. She pushed the scrunchie onto her wrist and waved her hand around for all to see. "And it's supercute as a bracelet," she said.

"Jac?" Marlow repeated. "Is Ida on vacation?"

The end of her sentence slipped under the clatter of something breaking on the ground. The women turned to see a server bot bent over the shards of a wineglass. Marlow watched the lilies in the coffee table vase twist in the same direction, their scarlet pistils stretching to train their tiny cameras on the action. She could swear the bot had dropped the glass to drown out the sound of Ida's name.

When she looked back at Jacqueline, her friend nodded once and dabbed at her lips. It was their signal for Tell you off-camera.

An hour later, as Marlow passed the powder room, Jacqueline's arm shot out of it and pulled her inside. "Ida's gone," she said, as she pulled the door shut.

"Gone?" Marlow saw herself in the mirror. One of Jacqueline's hair drones, its silver talons clacking near her ear, had pinned a ridiculous silk bow barrette into her dark waves.

"Yup," Jacqueline said. "Just up and left Mike and the kids. Blew right through the perimeter. Left the fucking state." She walked her fingers on an invisible path through the air. "Check your map. She's in Denver. And for God's sake, Marlow—don't mention her on camera again."

"But what about her contract?" Marlow said. "I thought she and Mike were doing the whole on-the-rocks thing this year." She unlatched her barrette and massaged her scalp, ignoring Jacqueline's puffed breath of protest.

"They didn't even stage a hunt for her, supposedly," Jacqueline said, adjusting the pearl comb at her temple. She sucked her cheeks in and glared at herself in the glass. "How shitty would that feel? It's like they don't even care she's gone. I honestly think the network was glad to get the chance to sub in that new girl. Diversity and all."

"Jacqueline." Marlow spoke in a firm voice. This was something she had been trying to do more since she turned thirty-five—the age felt, to her, like a cosmic deadline for being strong and self-possessed. Complete. "Hunts aren't real," she said.

"They certainly are," Jacqueline returned, in a tone that trumped hers effortlessly, and Marlow let it go. Jacqueline was an incorrigible know-it-all. It was what Marlow loved most about her. Her friend's brazen authority always made her feel safe.

Excerpted from Followers by Megan Angelo. Copyright © 2020 by Megan Angelo. Excerpted by permission of Graydon House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.